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Local Teach-In in Prep for National Action on December 6^th

By David Lagstein, San Diego ACCE

Note: ACCE is organizing a “Know Your Rights” teach-in on Saturday, December 3 at 11am at the San Diego Civic Center Plaza, which will include a discussion of our local participation in the national day of action.

Four years ago Wall Street bankers crashed our economy after reckless gambling with our homes and our livelihoods. Then they looted our Treasury for bailouts and bonuses while their 1% allies used the economic chaos as an excuse to rob us of the investments we’ve made in helping every Californian achieve the American Dream.

By Trymaine Lee / Huffington Post / November 30, 2011

DETROIT — In recent years Grand Circus Park, despite the slow gentrification of downtown Detroit, has been most welcoming to hard-luck natives, laid-off blue collar workers and other jobless, the self-medicating and many of the city’s chronic homeless. Many of them, like the majority of the city itself, were black.

So when the Occupy protests sprouted here, and waves of young, mostly white protesters arrived from outside the city with their tents and their cardboard signs and people’s microphones, the park’s invisible demarcation lines of class and race were for a time blurred, eroding in small measure what has been one of the central complaints about the movement, its lack of diversity.

By rexymeteorite / Daily Kos / November 29th

There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the direction of the Occupy movement, its message, its leaderless nature, its outside-of-the-beltway tactics and the everyone-is-invited attitude of the Occupiers. There has been much consternation about Occupy foregoing the two party system debate and instead focusing on direct action, and other ways to influence our rusted out old political system without having to argue about democrats or republicans. While concerns about the movement should be addressed, and problems solved in a timely manner, these specific criticisms have gotten as stale as week old bread.

By Cristian Tapia / FOX40 News / November 29, 2011

Occupy movements in major West Coast cities are planning a coordinated blockade and shutdown of their local ports on December 12.

In a press release received Tuesday morning, it states, Occupy L.A., Occupy San Diego and Occupy Portland are listed as some of the major port cities joining Occupy Oakland to mobilize thousands of people to shut down their local ports

By Dave Rice / San Diego Reader / November 28

Occupy San Diego is preparing to once again attempt to set up a tent encampment in Civic Center Plaza this afternoon, according to a brief release the group prepared last night.

Energized by a video shot in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving day depicting eight or more police officers holding a wheelchair-bound man face down while making an arrest, at least 50 members of Occupy San Diego have decided that they have waited long enough for a discussion with the city council on ending the sleeping ban that has recently been enforced in the Plaza and surrounding blocks.

See the video inside…

An Online Petition by Citizens of San Diego

Why This Is Important

Chief Lansdowne has mishandled the Occupy San Diego Protest. He has facilitated the waste of over 2.4 million dollars in 30 days on suppressing free speech at Civic Center Plaza in San Diego.

He has ordered the macing and beating of peaceful protesters and continues to waste over $57,000 per day on intimidating, harassing, and suppressing the peaceful protest rather than protecting and serving the interests of those exercising their freedom of speech and assembly.

We the Citizens of San Diego call on Chief Lansdowne to resign his post as Chief of Police immediately.

Sign this Petition!

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality

By Naomi Wolf / guardian.co.uk / November 25, 2011

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

Here’s a round-up of Occupation matters:

Police crackdowns on Occupy camps are the real threat

By Linda Lye / SFGate / November 23, 2011

Around California and all over the country, we have been told that Occupy encampments must come down because of “health and safety concerns.” But all around the country, we have seen the police take down these encampments with an overzealous use of pepper spray, tear gas and flash-bang grenades. The real “health threat” we should be concerned about is the threat to the health of our democracy when the government reacts to peaceful political expression with police violence. Go here for the remainder of this article.

San Diego Police on UC Davis Pepper Spraying: ‘We don’t want that here.’

By Danya Bacchus and Sarah Grieco / NBC San Diego / Nov 21, 2011

What happened at UC Davis has local law enforcement talking. San Diego Police officers have said they’ve had the tough job of balancing the first amendment rights of Occupy San Diego protesters and enforcing the law.

Editor: It’s official: the City of San Diego and its Police Department have finally released figures on how much is being spent patrolling the Occupy San Diego protests. (Were they finally pressured to do so by our searing posts? See here.) The City has spent nearly $57,000 daily and a total of $2.4 million on the protests since they began on October 7th. This does not include costs for the County Sheriffs when they were used. Here’s the San Diego U-T coverage:

By Matthew T. Hall and Ashly McGlone / San Diego U-T / Nov. 22, 2011

The city’s police department said Tuesday it paid $143,918 in overtime costs for four major operations during the Occupy San Diego protests against corporate greed that began Oct. 7 at Civic Center Plaza.

Editor: Here is a brief report of Occupy San Diego’s day in court by Todd Cardiff, the attorney who argued the demonstrators’ case in Federal Court today.

By Todd T. Cardiff, Esq.

On November 22, 2011, the Occupy SD movement, represented by Plaintiffs Eugene Davidovich, Davina Lynch, and John Kenney, appeared in court seeking a temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing the City from enforcing San Diego Municipal Code section 54.0110. Attorney Todd T. Cardiff represented the plaintiffs. Bryan Pease is the lead attorney on the case.

Plaintiffs argued that the ordinance prohibited people from placing any object on City property.

The first Buy Nothing Day was organized in Mexico in September 1992 “as a day for society to examine the issue of over-consumption.” In 1997, it was moved to the Friday after American Thanksgiving, also called “Black Friday”, which is one of the 10 busiest shopping days in the United States. Outside North America and Israel, Buy Nothing Day is the following Saturday. Participation now includes more than 65 nations.

From AdBsuters

You’ve been sleeping on the streets for two months pleading peacefully for a new spirit in economics. And just as your camps are raided, your eyes pepper sprayed and your head’s knocked in, another group of people are preparing to camp-out. Only these people aren’t here to support occupy Wall Street, they’re here to secure their spot in line for a Black Friday bargain at Super Target and Macy’s.

Editor: A shortened version of the following article by Rebecca Solnit appeared on the Op-Ed page of today’s LA Times. We thought the entire piece is worthy of your read, so here it is.

By Rebecca Solnit / TomDispatch.com / November 22, 2011

Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the dozens of ways you could tell that the authorities take Occupy Wall Street seriously, even if they profoundly mistake what kind of danger it poses. If you ever doubted whether you were powerful or you mattered, just look at the reaction to people like you (or your children) camped out in parks from Oakland to Portland, Tucson to Manhattan.